“Are they breaching?” Varro asks, his voice tight.
“No,” I say, watching the thermal feed. “They’re waiting. They’re testing the perimeter. Seeing if we light them up. Seeing if we panic.”
“What do we do? Do I fire the warning shots?”
“No. Firing gives them a reason to return fire. Right now, they’re only trespassing.”
I look at the monitor displaying the interior of the Guest Suite. The feed is still dark because I ordered it cut earlier, but the biometric sensors are active.
“Where is she?” I ask.
“Guest Suite,” Varro says. “Heart rate is elevated, but stationary. She’s still in the room.”
I look at the schematic of the house.
The Guest Suite is in the East Wing. It has floor-to-ceiling windows facing the ocean and the forest edge. It’s beautiful. It’s luxurious.
It’s also structurally soft.
If the Syndicate decides to breach, they won’t come through the reinforced front gate. They will flank the house. The East Wing faces the approach road. One RPG through that glass, and she’s dead.
Or worse. If they breach the room before I can get to her, they take her.
“The Guest Suite is vulnerable,” I say. “Hurricane glass. Bad sightlines. If they come through the woods, she’s sitting in the kill zone.”
“Where do you want her? The bunker?”
“No.”
The bunker is safe, but it’s a trap. If they overrun the house and weld the door shut, we die in a hole.
“If they get her,” Varro says quietly, “they win.”
“Exactly,” I say. “If they get her, we lose our shield. As long as she is here, they have to be careful. If they extract her, they will level this place with us inside it.”
I turn for the door, checking the load on my sidearm.
“Where are you going?”
“To move her.”
“To the Tower?”
“It’s the most defensible room in the house,” I say. “Reinforced concrete, and they can't get an RPG trajectory on that height from the tree line. Bulletproof polycarbonate. Plus, I want her where I can see her.”
“I’ll lock down the elevator,” Varro says. “Go.”
I run.
I take the stairs two at a time, boots hammering against the steel treads. I burst out into the main hallway of the ground floor. The house is dark. The emergency shutters haven’t deployed yet, so the lightning from the storm flashes through the windows, illuminating the vast, empty space in strobe-light bursts.
It’s quiet, which is the worst part. Outside, four armored vehicles watch us in the dark, while inside, the house is silent—the calm before the hurricane.
I reach the East Wing corridor. I skid to a stop in front of the Guest Suite door.
I punch in the code. The lock disengages. I shove the door open.
The room is dim, lit only by the faint glow of the television screen, which has moved on to a silent weather map.
